Saturday, December 08, 2012

Not to act all smarter than their base

Birmingham, Alabama (PRWEB) December 04, 2012 – The results of a 4 year study show that Americans who obtain their news from Fox News channel have an average IQ of 80, which represents a 20 point deficit when compared to the U.S. national average of 100. IQ, or intelligence quotient, is the international standard of assessing intelligence. Researchers at The Intelligence Institute, a conservative non-profit group, tested 5,000 people using a series of tests that measure everything from cognitive aptitude to common sense and found that people who identified themselves as Fox News viewers and ‘conservative’ had, on average, significantly lower intelligent quotients. Fox Viewers represented 2,650 members of the test group.

I don't know about this study (sounds dubious), but at least it is a study, as opposed to a paranoid delusion, which in and of itself sounds at least 20 IQ points higher.

6 comments:

I'm wondering if PRWEB got punked on this one. The institute's website shows nothing on its news, papers or research pages. The front page is just PR bullshit about business intelligence, and the only pages that seem to be populated are about AI and links.

And the "P. Nichols" researcher name sounds a bit like a "Pee Nickels" pun.

Sure, it sounds plausible, given all the other studies done that indicate that Fox News viewers are consistently (and, apparently, blissfully) mis- and ill-informed, but, truth is, random sampling and gathering 5,000 people to give them a battery of IQ tests would be hugely expensive, unlike doing a phone survey.

Nope, I think this one is a "Yes Men" prank, or it was a slow news day and some copy editor was having some fun writing a phony press release, or maybe someone lifted this from an old edition of the Onion.

Dr. Google is pretty sure this is a spoof. It's not very PC, either, to suggest that people of very low intelligence are necessarily malevolent, paranoid, and lacking in empathy. They may have as poor a grasp on current events as Fox News viewers do (See the Side-Boob story to which the "Intelligence Institute" release links), but for different reasons. "Shallow, but not narrow!"

PRWEB is a website made to promote other websites by using press releases. There is no editorial control over the content. They just accept a small fee, and publish the press release.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a mini-scandal about a company with less than $1 million total capitalization, where a PRWEB release said Google was going to buy it for $400 million. The stock market was excited for the length of time it took for Google to call bullsh*t. Obviously an illegal pump and dump.